Interpretations of the End of the Soviet Union: Three Paradigms

Interpretations of the End of the Soviet Union: Three Paradigms

David Rowley
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Volume

2, Number 2, Spring 2001 (New Series), pp. 395-426 (Article)
Published by Slavica Publishers

DOI: 10.1353/kri.2008.0107
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/kri/summary/v002/2.2rowley.html
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Interpretations of the End of the Soviet Union: Three Paradigms*
David Rowley
The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of communist rule in Russia
might have been expected to resolve the dominant debate among scholars of
Soviet history and politics during the Cold War: was the Soviet regime a totali-
tarian dictatorship or a modernizing society? The totalitarian school defined the
Soviet regime as an ideologically driven dictatorship that aimed at total control of
the society it governed. This dramatic disappearance of the USSR in the fall of
1991 was immediately understood by those who adhered to the totalitarian
model as vindication of their point of view. Two of the field’s most notable
scholars drew just that conclusion. Martin Malia asserted, “One might think that
the great crash of 1989–91 would have settled these questions once and for all
with the conclusion that communism was irreformable, since it in fact failed to
reform itself.”1 Walter Laqueur added, “for those in the West who had argued
over the years that the Soviet Union was making slow but steady progress toward
greater freedom and prosperity, the fall of the empire was a dramatic refutation
of their theories.”2
The case is not as obvious as they imply, however, for “the great crash” and
the “fall of the empire” are not empirical realities but highly interpretive con-
cepts. First, the “great crash” of the Soviet Union would seem to have little in
common with the collapse of other autocratic or authoritarian regimes. There
was practically no violence – no anarchic riots, no massive repression, no civil
war. Popular demonstrations never went beyond the realm of political behavior
that is considered normal in modern democratic societies. Nor was the govern-
ment “overthrown.” No government buildings were stormed. No former leaders
were executed – or even arrested!3 The Communist Party of the Soviet Union
relinquished power without a fight, and the Supreme Soviet peacefully voted
itself out of existence. Moreover, there was hardly a change in political leadership
*
I thank the editors of Kritika for their extremely helpful criticism and advice.
1
Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free
Press, 1994), 492.
2
Walter Laqueur, The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1994), 190.
3
The organizers of the August coup attempt were not arrested as an act of revolutionary justice,
but because they had violated the laws of the Soviet Union.
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2(2): 395–426, Spring 2001.
396 DAVID ROWLEY
or administrative personnel; the post-Soviet republics are largely governed by

former members of the Communist Party. Perhaps most important, there was no
immediate constitutional change. No new governments were created; no new
states appeared. The republics of the former Soviet Union continued for some
time to operate according to the Soviet Constitution of 1977 (as amended). To
call this a “collapse” in the sense that France collapsed in 1789, China in 1911,
or Russia in 1917 requires considerable interpretive agility. By emphasizing con-
tinuity, some former “revisionists” (as we shall see) continue to argue that the
case for the totalitarian model has still not been proven.
Second, even if one continues to conceive of the dissolution of the Soviet
Union in the fall of 1991 as a “collapse” (the sudden disappearance of a super-
power was certainly a remarkable and unprecedented occurrence), it is neverthe-
less possible to distinguish between two categorically distinct processes: the end
of a totalitarian regime and the dissolution of a federal state, or, as Laqueur
termed it, “the fall of the empire.” It could be argued that totalitarianism had
already reformed itself out of existence and the Soviet Union had already “con-
verged” with the West some time before the Soviet state ceased to exist. To
mention a few momentous changes: in 1986–87 political prisoners were freed
and censorship of the press ended, in 1989 the Communist Party instituted elec-
tions with secret ballots and multiple candidates and the first independent politi-
cal parties were formed, in 1990 the Communist Party renounced its “leading
role” in governing the country. One could argue that by the summer of 1991 the
Soviet Union had progressed far beyond the classic definition of totalitarianism.4
According to this interpretation, what “collapsed” in the fall of 1991 was not
communist dictatorship but the Soviet federal state. This would suggest that the
logic of collapse arose not from the nature of totalitarian rule but from the nature
of empires. Following this line of analysis, a third position has appeared in the
debate over the nature of the Soviet regime. Though under-theorized in Anglo-
American scholarship before 1991, the idea that the Soviet Union was an empire
implies an ultimate collapse due to decay of central institutions, over-extension,
and revolt of the periphery.
Instead of resolving the debate over the nature of the Soviet regime, there-
fore, the “collapse” of the USSR has itself become a highly contested concept. Its
meaning is now being interpreted in terms of the definitions for which it was
4
According to the classic definition, totalitarianism is characterized by “1) a totalist ideology; 2) a
single party committed to this ideology and usually led by one man, the dictator; 3) a fully devel-
oped secret police; and three kinds of monopoly or, more precisely, of monopolistic control:
namely, over a) mass communications; b) operational weapons; and c) all organizations, including
economic enterprises, thus involving a centrally-planned economy.” Carl J. Friedrich,
“Totalitarianism: Recent Trends,” Problems of Communism 17: 3 (1968), 33.
I NTERPRETATIONS OF THE E ND OF THE S OVIET UNION 397
expected to provide the decisive test. Consequently, rather than considering the
concepts of “totalitarian,” “modernizing,” or “imperial” as competing definitions
within one scholarly enterprise, it appears that we should consider them to be
rival paradigms. To paraphrase Thomas Kuhn, we might observe that what dif-
ferentiates these various approaches is their incommensurable ways of seeing the
world. They appear to be attempting to force the details of Soviet history into
the conceptual boxes supplied by the paradigms they employ.
In essence, these conflicting points of view result not from differences in
empirical historical analysis (there is no significant disagreement over the facts),
but from different metahistorical approaches. From a social scientific perspective,
each approach attempts to establish a generic identity of the Soviet regime by
comparing it with other regimes. The totalitarian perspective points to the
uniqueness of Soviet communism and holds that it can only be placed in the
same category as perverse and unnatural regimes such as Nazi Germany.5 The
modernizing perspective considers Soviet society to be a variant of European
modernity.6 The imperial model suggests parallels with the Roman, Ottoman,
Austrian, and, most particularly, the tsarist Russian empires.7
This sort of regime identification is inseparably connected with historical
periodization. Choosing dates for historical disjunctures and giving them names
such as “revolution” or “collapse” is to assert that the ensuing period is qualita-
tively different from the former. On this basis it is evident that the totalitarian,
modernizing, and imperial paradigms are identified by the points they choose as
beginnings and endings of the regime they define. Thus, because adherents of the
5
The term “totalitarian” arose from the attempts of Hannah Arendt and Jakob Talmon to under-
stand Nazism and the Holocaust not as an extreme form of traditional politics but as a new
phenomenon. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951);
Jacob L. Talmon, The Rise of Totalitarian Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952). Scholars such
as Carl Friedrich, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Raymond Bauer, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhohn ap-
plied the term “totalitarian” to the Soviet Union. They portrayed it as profoundly different from
Western states (even authoritarian ones) and irreconcilably opposed to the West. Carl J. Friedrich
and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1956); Raymond A. Bauer, Alex Inkeles, and Clyde Kluckhohn, How the Soviet System
Works: Cultural, Psychological, and Social Themes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956). For
a history of the concept of totalitarianism, see Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of
the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
6
H. Gordon Skilling first applied the concept of “interest group politics” to Soviet government,
and Jerry Hough began to use the term “institutional pluralism” to describe Soviet politics. (H.
Gordon Skilling and Franklyn Griffiths, Interest Groups in Soviet Politics [Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1971]; Jerry F. Hough, The Soviet Prefects: The Local Party Organs in Industrial
Decision-Making [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969], and How the Soviet Union is
Governed [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979]).
7
Before 1991, the imperial model was subordinated to the totalitarian model, as I discuss below.
398 DAVID ROWLEY
totalitarian model conceive it as being historically unique, they have tended to

stress the disjuncture between the reforming trends of late tsarism and the ideo-
logical partocracy of Soviet communism.8 Adherents of the modernizing model
have agreed that there is a sharp break in 1917, but they have tended to stress the
unviability of tsarism and emphasize the social roots of what they consider a new
modernizing regime.9 Unlike both totalitarian and modernizing models, the im-
perial paradigm does not consider 1917 to be a significant break at all. Both
despotism and empire continue in different forms.10 However, where both the
totalitarian and the imperial model posit a significant disjuncture in 1991 (the
8
The debate over the nature of the Soviet system was inseparably connected with the debate over
the origins of Soviet communism. Those who held that the Soviet Union was a regime in which
society was non-existent and politics all-important also defended the view that the revolution was
essentially and wholly a political event. The outcome of October, in the words of Richard Pipes,
“… was determined by conflicts between small elites, and if the Bolsheviks triumphed it was not
because they enjoyed greater popular support but because they were better organized, more power-
hungry, and less scrupulous.” Richard Pipes, “1917 and the Revisionists,” The National Interest 31
(1993), 70. See also Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1990) and
Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1993). The same point is made by
Martin Malia in The Soviet Tragedy.
9
The groundwork for this view was laid by Leopold Haimson’s “The Problem of Social Stability in
Urban Russia, 1905–1917,” Slavic Review 23: 4 (1964), 619–42 and Slavic Review 24: 1 (1965),
1–22 in which he suggested that the revolution of 1917 was due neither to the accident of World
War I or the conspiracy of a revolutionary minority, but to fundamental social instability. Haimson
was followed by historians who have argued that the October Revolution was the product of a
profound social upheaval whose interests the Bolsheviks to a considerable extent represented. David
Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power: From the July Days 1917 to July
1918 (London: Macmillan, 1984); Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power: The
Revolution of 1917 in Petrograd (New York: Norton, 1976); Diane Koenker, Moscow Workers and
the 1917 Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); William G. Rosenberg and
Diane P. Koenker, “The Limits of Formal Protest: Worker Activism and Social Polarization in
Petrograd and Moscow, March to October 1917,” American Historical Review 92: 2 (1987),
296–326; and S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1983). This trend was summed up in two review articles by Ronald G. Suny,
“Toward a Social History of the October Revolution,” American Historical Review 88: 1 (1983),
31–52, and “Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics,”
Russian Review 53: 2 (1994), 165–82.
10
The most extreme position on this question has been taken by Mikhail Agursky in The Third
Rome: National Bolshevism in the USSR (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987). Agursky represents
Bolshevism as the agent of the Russian state in its geopolitical confrontation with Germany. In his
view, Marxism was only a means by which Lenin sought world power and the aggrandizement of
the Russian State. Agursky suggests that “National Bolshevism” was something quite different from
Russian cultural nationalism or socialist idealism. It “… legitimizes the Soviet political system from
the Russian etatist point of view, contrary to its exclusive Marxist legitimacy” (xv). However, no
one in the Anglo-American academic community has wholeheartedly accepted this position.
end of despotism and the end of empire), the modernizing model stresses
continuity at most, and accidental discontinuity at least.

Before proceeding to examine how these three points of view have been repre-
sented in the Anglo-American literature on the end of Soviet communism, two
caveats are necessary. First, although I attempt to infer the relation of each work
under review to one of the three paradigms I have described, I do not intend to
reduce the importance of the work to the paradigm in which it can be situated.
While no one can ultimately avoid the question of regime definition, neither is
this typically the main goal of each scholar. I chose for this analysis only works of
serious and sophisticated scholarship, each of which contributes importantly
both to our empirical knowledge of the last years of Soviet history and to the
methodology of its discipline. It is beyond the scope of an essay such as this to
give them the detailed attention they deserve. My purpose is not so much his-
torical as metahistorical: I wish to consider how political conceptualization and
historical periodization can affect historical interpretation.
Second, I do not wish to imply that evidence of three paradigmatic under-
standings of the nature of the Soviet regime within the field of Soviet
studies/Russian history means that there are three coherent and self-conscious
schools marching in ideological lock-step. Far from it. There has always been a
great diversity of scholarly approaches in the field as a whole and much fruitful
interaction among the various points of view. Nor do proponents of the same
paradigm necessarily share the same attitude towards it. For example, it is possi-
ble to share the view of the totalitarian school – the Soviet Union was a unique
phenomenon that could not transform into something else but could only col-
lapse – without subscribing to the idea that it failed because socialism is contrary
to human nature. The view that the Soviet Union was headed toward ultimate
failure could also be a natural product of the historicist tendency to define phe-
nomena by the way in which they end and to find within them “the seeds of
their own destruction.”
However unsatisfactory the terms “totalitarian” and “revisionist” are, they
are so commonly used that it would seem confusing and arbitrary to introduce
an alternate terminology at this point. In this article, I will use “totalitarian” to
refer to the idea that the Soviet Union was a unique and unprecedented regime
doomed to collapse – whether or not the scholar to whom I apply that term sub-
scribes to the “classic” totalitarian position that holds that communism must fail
because the socialist idea is contrary to human nature. Similarly, I will use “revi-
sionist” or “modernizing” to signify the position that the Soviet Union was a
variant of European modernity progressing toward convergence with the West –
even though frequently the chief argument of the “revisionist” position is simply
400 DAVID ROWLEY
that the Communist Party was less monolithic and was more influenced by
Soviet society than the totalitarian model allowed.

Nevertheless, in its classic exposition, the logic of the totalitarian paradigm is
built upon the idea that communism is an impossible utopia. 11 Following this
line of reasoning in The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia,
1917–1991, Martin Malia asserts that “Socialism originates in a moral idea –
equality – and culminates in a practical program – the end of private property
and the market.” 12 Thus “… socialism is not a historical or social science term at
all, but ultimately a messianic, indeed a quasi-magical term…”13 This utopian-
ism inevitably leads to violence. In Malia’s words, since “… what the Soviets
were trying to accomplish was from the very beginning impossible … so the
Soviet goal could be pursued only through a mixture of ideological illusion and
raw coercion.”14 Moreover, since it is unnatural, socialism will never strike reso-
nant chords in the population and gain its support. Reform is impossible because
once coercion is lifted, the people will simply reject the system. Malia asserts: “Of
all the reasons for the collapse of communism, the most basic is that it was an
intrinsically nonviable, indeed impossible project from the beginning.” 15
In his more empirically grounded conclusion to The Soviet Tragedy, Malia
gives a more circumstantial explanation of the “great crash of 1989–91”:
The most fundamental cause was the economic decline and its repercus-
sions for the Soviet Union’s superpower status. It is this crisis of
performance that moved Gorbachev to launch perestroika in the first
place; and his restructuring soon led him to attack the party, and so run
what turned out to be the suicidal risks of glasnost ¢ and then of democra-
tization. Finally, the economic decline discredited the claims of the
ideology, and glasnost ¢ made it possible to proclaim this fact, thereby
11
“In the final analysis,” says Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Marxist-Leninist policies were derived from …
a fatal misconception of human nature.” Brzezinski, 241. According to Richard Pipes, “In their
pursuit of utopia, the Communists violated everything we know from anthropology that human
beings, even in the most primitive circumstances, desire and practice.” Richard Pipes, “The Fall of
the Soviet Union,” in The Collapse of Communism, ed. Lee Edwards (Stanford: Hoover Institution
Press, 1999), 46.
12
Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, 34.
13
14
Martin Malia, “A Fatal Logic,” The National Interest 31 (Spring 1993), 81.
15
Martin Malia, “The Highest State of Socialism,” in Collapse of Communism, 71. As Pipes puts it:
“… the decisive catalyst – the cause of causes, the one that ensured that the Soviet regime would
fail sooner or later … no matter what it did and no matter what was done to it – appears to have
[been] … the utopian nature of its objectives.” Pipes, “The Fall of the Soviet Union,” 42.
delegitimizing the system and, ultimately, depriving it of the will to

coerce. And this circumstance in turn made possible the revolt of the
minority nationalities and the collapse of the people’s democracies.
Finally, we may include in the chain of causation various tactical errors
of Gorbachev, such as pushing democratization faster than economic
liberalization, or, at the end, surrounding himself with conservative
enemies of his own reforms.16
Here Malia summarizes the key interpretations implied by the totalitarian
paradigm: the Soviet Union “collapsed” due to some inner flaw or contradiction
within the Soviet political/social/economic system; any attributes of modernity (a
civil society, popular demand for democracy) that arose during the transition
from communism to post-communism appeared in reaction to and in spite of
communism and did not grow naturally out of it; Gorbachev compromised his
own reforms by refusing to give up communism; and movements for national
self-determination are symptoms of the regime’s failure, not causes of its collapse.
Another way of explaining why the Soviet political system was unable to re-
form itself is to seek reasons why the Soviet regime lost the legitimacy to govern.
Leslie Holmes, building upon Max Weber’s modes of political legitimacy, argues
in The End of Communist Power: Anti-Corruption Campaigns and Legitimation
Crisis that a communist regime must fail once it abandons pure coercion to en-
force its rule. Neither “eudaemonism” nor “legal-rationality” are compatible with
Marxism-Leninism – the first because socialism does not work, the second be-
cause the “relatively high level of voluntarism typical of Marxist-Leninist systems
… cannot be fully reconciled with the depersonalization that is crucial to legal-
rationality.”17 The specific mechanism by which the legitimacy of the
Communist Party is undermined is official anti-corruption campaigns that ex-
pose the contradiction between the realities of Soviet power and its purported
claim to legal-rational legitimacy.18 Holmes’s overall logic suggests that commu-
nist systems will fail when the population realizes that the Party cannot deliver its
socialist promise.
Neil Robinson, in Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System, takes much
the same position when he argues that the inner contradiction of Soviet commu-
nism lay in its representation of itself as the only agent that could realize the
communist ideal.19 This made any attempt at “meta-communication” a subver-
16
Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, 492–93.
17
Leslie Holmes, The End of Communist Power: Anti-Corruption Campaigns and Legitimation Crisis
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 53.
18
Holmes, End of Communist Power, 274.
19
Neil Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System: A Critical History of Soviet Ideologi-
cal Discourse (Aldershot, Hants, UK: Edward Elgar, 1995), 25.
402 DAVID ROWLEY
sive force. That is, “… there could be no commentary on the way in which the
system was structured for such comment would have been a denial of the truth of
the telos and of the power of the party.”20 Gorbachev’s mistake was to initiate
this meta-communication by making the party both the “object and the tran-
scendent subject of perestroika,” and the contradiction between the party as the
agent of communism and the goal of a self-administering society reappeared even
more dangerously than before. 21 Open elections made it manifest that the party
could not produce what it promised nor could it change itself. “Once this was
not just known in secret and talked of around the kitchen table, the loss of con-
trol by the party, its collapse into warring factions, and the destruction of the
Soviet state were inevitable…” 22
In Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions,
Stephen Hanson concludes that Soviet communism failed because it could not
engage the enthusiasm of its population in its attempt to “reorder the human
relationship to time.” 23 Hanson argues that Marx substituted proletarian revolu-
tion for Hegel’s idea of Geist as a charismatic agent that “… could not only
triumph over the cycles of nature but even transfigure the abstract, linear time in
which the laws of science operated ….” 24 In consequence, “… the goal of Soviet
Socialism was to organize time in such a manner as to master time itself.”25
Hanson portrays Gorbachev not as a Western-style economic reformer, but as a
revolutionary innovator in the tradition of Lenin and Stalin who tried to stimu-
late at the grass roots level the sort of attack on time that was coercively imposed
during the period of Stalin’s rule. Hanson asserts that Gorbachev’s reforms were
all negative; Gorbachev wanted to destroy the corrupt and bureaucratic USSR of
Brezhnev and unleash popular initiative. Gorbachev’s destruction of the system
was all too effective, but his hope for a popular “attack upon time” by the popu-
lation never took place. Lacking a positive reform program, the system disinte-
grated.26 Thus, like Holmes and Robinson, Hanson takes the impossibility of
communist goals as a given and argues that the system will fail. They disagree
only on the process by which the population came to be disaffected.
Bobo Lo also examines Gorbachev’s attempt to mobilize the population to
improve labor productivity, but Lo offers a less essentialist argument. In Soviet
20
Robinson, Ideology and Collapse, 21.
21
22
23
Stephen E. Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (Chapel
Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 1997), x.
24
Hanson, Time and Revolution, 32.
25
Hanson, Time and Revolution, viii.
26
Hanson, Time and Revolution, 194–96.
Labour Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet State, Lo argues that “… the
regime’s search for labour productivity was the major factor in the collapse of the
Soviet state,” not because of poor economic performance, in itself, but because
“… the regime’s increasingly chaotic and uncertain policy responses … high-
lighted the vulnerability of the Soviet ruling caste and opened it up to the possi-
bility of a successful challenge.” “Faced by a Soviet leadership bereft of self-
confidence and lacking the wherewithal or the will to reestablish its authority,
new political forces emerged to fill the vacuum – Yeltsin in Moscow, and the
republican power elites at the periphery.”27 Lo does not claim that the socialist
project is impossible, but his conclusions support the totalitarian model in that
he treats the loss of power of the “Soviet ruling caste” as a decisive failure of the
Soviet project.
Looking at the question of legitimacy from the point of view of the
Communist Party rather than the Soviet population, Paul Hollander, in Political
Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism, asserts that
“the self-assurance and sense of legitimacy of the ruling political elite provide the
key to system maintenance in highly authoritarian states such as the former
Soviet Union and its allies. Such self-assurance and the associated will to power
must in turn be nurtured by deeply held political beliefs …”28 He then argues
that the unviability of communism was manifested by the fact that the leaders
themselves realized that their Marxist project was mistaken. Having lost faith in
their ideology, they no longer had the will to apply the kinds of coercion upon
which such a system depends.29 Consequently, “The leaders’ loss of political will,
intertwined with their eroding sense of legitimacy, appears to be the crucial fac-
tor in the unraveling of the communist systems.”30 Ultimately Hollander con-
cludes that socialism must fail because of the unreality of its goals. Quoting from
Richard Pipes, he says that “it is increasingly clear that ‘communism was based
on a theoretical misdiagnosis of the human condition’ and, one may add, on a
peculiarly contradictory conception of human nature.”31
Another group of scholars leaves aside the question of whether or not social-
ism is possible, identifies the Soviet system as inherently dictatorial, and focuses
on the problem of preserving one-party rule. In The Rebirth of Politics in Russia,
Michael Urban asserts that politics and communism are fundamentally antitheti-
27
Bobo Lo, Soviet Labour Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet State (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1999), 6.
28
Paul Hollander, Political Will and Personal Belief: The Decline and Fall of Soviet Communism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 14.
29
Hollander, Political Will and Personal Belief, 9.
30
31
404 DAVID ROWLEY
cal,32 by which he means that the Communist Party’s monopolistic hold on

power forced opponents of the Party (both dissidents under Brezhnev and re-
formers under Gorbachev) to direct their messages to the state and not to society.
Thus civic institutions and citizenship could only grow outside and not inside
the Soviet system. 33 “Consequently, political society could express itself only in
relation to state power directly, ultimately defining itself against the state.”34 “…
Attempts to transform the structure of relations between regime and society and
to create a mechanism promising to strengthen the party-state’s actual capacity
for government would lead to breakdown … initiating in the process a broad
political front whose anti-communist orientation would imprint itself on Russia’s
political rebirth.” 35 Here Urban strongly makes the case for “collapse” rather
than “transition”; according to him, the new political order arose from outside
the communist system.
In The Collapse of a Single-Party System: The Disintegration of the CPSU,
Graeme Gill summarizes his explanation of the Communist Party’s structural
flaws thus:
The key characteristic of the party which was at the heart of this type of
system was organisational penetration of all sectors of society and strictly
disciplined centralism. But when the party’s basic task, direct adminis-
trative supervision, was removed, it found itself without a role that fitted
its own organisational structures and culture or the new conditions. This
was exacerbated by the emergence of new competitors challenging the
party’s power and position. In such circumstances, internal discipline
collapsed and with it the party as a coherent organisation… This sug-
gests that the inflexibility of the administrative party system severely
limited its capacity to cope with a changing environment, and was
thereby the crucial factor in the collapse of communism.36
Gill thus joins Urban in interpreting dictatorship as the defining characteristic of
communism and identifying the Communist Party’s relinquishing of its
monopoly of power as collapse and not reform.
32
Michael Urban with Vyacheslav Igrunov and Sergei Mitrokhin, The Rebirth of Politics in Russia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 3.
33
Urban, Rebirth of Politics in Russia, 40, 74.
34
Urban, Rebirth of Politics in Russia, 74.
35
Urban, Rebirth of Politics in Russia, 55.
36
Graeme Gill, The Collapse of a Single-Party System: The Disintegration of the CPSU (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 184.
In a related analysis, Brendan Kiernan argues that democratizing reforms

were bound to fail because communism is incompatible with democracy,37 and
suggests that because of this Gorbachev was unable to find a way successfully to
incorporate popular aspirations in the old Soviet structures. In The End of Soviet
Politics: Elections, Legislatures, and the Demise of the Communist Party, Kiernan
says that “[Gorbachev] destroyed traditional communist solutions to the prob-
lems of power and leadership but did not provide workable institutional
replacements.”38 As a result, popular coalitions arose to fight against the party
apparatus – the most dominant organizing factor being republican nationality
interests. 39 Thus, “Gorbachev’s experiment with soviet government awakened
civil society while giving republican political elites a legitimate institutional
forum to press for sovereignty.”40
In Red Sunset: The Failure of Soviet Politics, Philip Roeder argues that the
collapse of the Soviet system proceeded from the Communist Party’s attempt to
avoid public accountability. 41 Even though the Party was founded on a conscious
plan to eliminate its accountability to the population, Roeder argues, the leader-
ship elite was not able to avoid accountability to its own bureaucracy. This
“institutionalization of reciprocal accountability and balanced leadership in-
creased the stability of the polity, but it also had a most perverse effect – it
limited the polity’s ability to innovate in policy and to adapt its institutions to
social change,” and it was this factor “… that over the long term brought whole-
sale collapse.”42 When Gorbachev began to change the system, “… it was easier
to begin reform initiatives than to set priorities and force sacrifices on a
bureaucracy that had immunized itself against accountability. A growing fiscal
crisis resulted.”43 As a result, Gorbachev was faced by a double defection. Con-
servatives became obstructive, and “… reformers pressed for decentralization and
institutional changes to strengthen reformist leaders within the republics in their
confrontation with the center.”44 Because the center was conservative and the
republics were reformist, the union fell apart. Both Kiernan and Roeder confirm
the totalitarian paradigm to the extent that they assert the system was unreform-
37
Brendan Kiernan, The End of Soviet Politics: Elections, Legislatures, and the Demise of the Commu-
nist Party (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 2.
38
Kiernan, End of Soviet Politics, 229.
39
40
41
Philip G. Roeder, Red Sunset: The Failure of Soviet Politics (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993), 6.
42
Roeder, Red Sunset, 6–8.
43
Roeder, Red Sunset, 238.
44
406 DAVID ROWLEY
able, but by pointing out the role of republican separatism, their evidence is also
relevant to the imperial paradigm (to be discussed below).
Since communism is primarily an economic idea – indeed, since so many
scholars take it to be inherently utopian – it was to be expected that the eco-
nomic component of the Soviet Union’s demise would attract much attention.
Nevertheless, no one has actually explained the collapse of the Soviet Union in
purely economic terms. There is an important distinction between the idea that
“the economic system of the Soviet Union … was fatally flawed from the very
beginning,” in the words of Andrzej Brzeski, and the idea that the collapse of the
Soviet Union was essentially an economic collapse. This is clarified in Brzeski’s
next sentence: “irreparable despite many attempts, it was sustained by political
structures and practices of the Marxist-Leninist party states.”45 If it is unwork-
able, one might say that communism is in a state of incipient collapse,
maintained only by pure force. The explanation of such a system’s collapse, then,
derives from the process by which its methods of political coercion lost their
efficacy.
Other economists agree. In What Went Wrong with Perestroika, Marshall
Goldman, one of the most incisive critics of the Soviet economy, portrays an
economic system that was failing and was unreformable, yet he implies that it
was the political effect of economic reform that was crucial. He argues that eco-
nomic decline did not destroy the system. Instead, Gorbachev’s economic
reforms discredited his authority at the center and encouraged national separa-
tism on the periphery.46 Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich also support
this view: they assert that “the system was probably not viable indefinitely…,”
but they conclude that the economic collapse “… ultimately resulted from: the
closed and arbitrary Soviet system of decision-making, characteristic of dictator-
ships; monumental incompetence; and a mistaken belief in the boundless
reformability of the traditional system.”47
Peter Rutland argues that the fundamental flaw in the system was the suffo-
cating effect on the economy of close supervision by the Communist Party. In
The Politics of Economic Stagnation in the Soviet Union: The Role of Local Party
Organs in Economic Management, Rutland asserts that party interference not only
contributed to the economic stagnation of the Brezhnev era, it vitiated
Gorbachev’s efforts at economic reform, as well. “Efforts to expand the scope for
market-like forces, even on a modest scale, came to naught. This was not simply
45
Andrej Brzeski, “The End of Communist Economics,” in Collapse of Communism, ed. Edwards,
119.
46
Marshall I. Goldman, What Went Wrong with Perestroika (New York: Norton, 1992), 225.
47
Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, “Overview,” in The Disintegration of the Soviet Eco-
nomic System, ed. Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich (London: Routledge, 1992), 31.
because of political opposition from conservative elements. It was more a case of

the whole body politic rejecting the foreign cells of marketization, however mod-
est, which local experiments or central reforms sought to inject.”48 Rutland
maintains that the Party reacted to reform by disintegrating into factions, and,
although he observes that it was the multinational character of the Soviet state
that ultimately caused it to disintegrate, he concludes that “… a crucial interme-
diary causal factor was the breakdown in solidarity and coherence of the ruling
CPSU elite.”49
Steven L. Solnick, in Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institu-
tions, finds the flaw in the Soviet economic system to exist not in its economic
logic but in its structural inability to limit human greed. Solnick points out that
local and branch managers had great latitude in running their daily affairs and
were able to manipulate the formal system of information flow to pursue private
agendas.50 The system collapsed when Gorbachev’s decentralization of the econ-
omy made it even easier for bureaucrats to circumvent supervision. Once it was
clear that higher officials could not control resources “… Soviet institutions were
victimized by the organizational equivalent of a colossal ‘bank run,’ in which lo-
cal officials rushed to claim their assets before the bureaucratic doors shut for
good.” “Soviet institutions did not simply atrophy or dissolve but were actively
pulled apart by officials at all levels seeking to extract assets that were in any way
fungible.”51
Another sort of economic argument is made by Manuel Castells and Emma
Kiselyova in The Collapse of Soviet Communism: A View from the Information
Society, where they argue that the high degree of political control in the Soviet
system made it incompatible with modern “informationalism,” that is “… a
mode of development in which the main source of productivity is the qualitative
capacity to optimize the combination and use of factors of production on the
basis of knowledge and information.”52 They argue that “ultimately, statism be-
comes powerless in a world where society’s capacity to constantly renew informa-
tion and information-embodying technology is the fundamental source of
economic and military power. And statism is also weakened, and ultimately de-
stroyed, by its incapacity to generate legitimacy on the basis of identity and self-
48
Peter Rutland, The Politics of Economic Stagnation in the Soviet Union: The Role of Local Party
Organs in Economic Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 218.
49
Rutland, The Politics of Economic Stagnation, 220, 221.
50
Steven L. Solnick, Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1999), 6.
51
Solnick, Stealing the State, 7.
52
Manuel Castells and Emma Kiselyova, The Collapse of Soviet Communism: A View from the
Information Society (Berkeley: International and Area Studies, University of California at Berkeley,
1995), 4.
408 DAVID ROWLEY
recognition.”53 For Castels and Kiselyova, the fundamental flaw was political, but
it was the modern economic context that caused that flaw to bring the system
down.
In the analysis that perhaps gives more weight to economic failure than any
other, Soviet Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika: The Soviet Labour Process and
Gorbachev’s Reforms, 1985–1991, Donald Filtzer argues that the essential failure
of the Soviet system was that it did not try to realize socialism.54 In other respects,
however, he supports the totalitarian model (he refers to the “ruthless and
ubiquitous repressive apparatus and the near-total atomization of society” 55), and
he argues that Gorbachev, far from attempting to perfect socialism, merely re-
structured elite power using “political liberalization as a condition of creating a
reproducible and effective system of economic coercion.”56 Without the
prerequisites for capitalism (financial markets, a stable and convertible currency,
a stock exchange, private property, etc.), he asserts, capitalism could not be im-
posed.57 The result was economic chaos: hoarding labor and resources,
appropriation of state property by managers, and general economic collapse.58

The arms race, because of its high profile in U.S. politics in the 1980s, might
have been expected to figure prominently as a cause of the collapse of the Soviet
Union. It has not. Because it is related to the economic explanation, the arms
race between the Soviet Union and the United States also must be considered by
the totalitarian paradigm only as catalyst and not a primary cause. If the Soviet
Union is thought of as doomed by its inner logic to ultimate failure, then U.S.
military competition could be only one of the historical contingencies associated
with its collapse.
This point is, in fact, revealed in the title of one very polemical attempt to
argue that U.S. policies were instrumental in the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Peter Schweizer’s Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Has-
tened the Collapse of the Soviet Union.59 To “hasten” is not to cause. Robert Gates,
53
Castells and Kiselyova, Collapse of Soviet Communism, 74.
54
Just the opposite, Filtzer considers “socialism as an inspirational vision of a future where people
could peacefully and collectively arrive at solutions to their fundamental problems.” Donald Filtzer,
Soviet Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika: The Soviet Labour Process and Gorbachev’s Reforms,
1985–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 224.
55
Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 1–2.
56
Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 216.
57
58
59
Peter Schweizer, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of
the Soviet Union (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1994).
whose ostensible thesis is expressed in the title of his book, From the Shadows:
The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War,
actually provides a complex explanation of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Gates posits the inevitability of communism’s collapse, arguing that U.S. policies
“… played a critical part in creating the perceived need for immediate reform,” 60
but also recognizing that domestic factors played the key role in the unraveling of
Gorbachev’s reforms.61

Biographies generally tend to emphasize individuals as historical agents and
hence to contradict notions of historical determinism (upon which any notion of
“inherent flaw” depends). However, some historical narratives that focus on the
career of Mikhail Gorbachev serve to support the totalitarian paradigm by seek-
ing to demonstrate that Gorbachev was a sincere Communist doing his best to
preserve and perfect the Soviet system. This is the approach taken by John B.
Dunlop, in The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, in which he por-
trays Gorbachev as the embodiment of communism’s inevitable doom. Dunlop
calls Gorbachev “a fervently committed Marxist-Leninist and staunch ‘Soviet
patriot’” and argues that Gorbachev’s reforms were typical Kremlin politics: “he
needed a defining program that would enable him first to isolate and then to
remove his powerful competitors in the Politburo.”62 Democratization,
according to Dunlop, was merely a slogan for such a defining program, and,
having released the genie from the bottle, Gorbachev spent the second half of his
tenure in office attempting to suppress the rise of public demand for real
democratization.63
Susanne Sternthal includes a similar interpretation in Gorbachev’s Reforms:
De-Stalinization through Demilitarization, asserting that “Gorbachev was a
devout Communist to the very end. The driving objective behind his ideas for
reform was to legitimize the Party’s leading role and make Soviet communism a
competitive, popular alternative.”64 Sternthal argues that Gorbachev tried to “de-
Stalinize” the economy by reallocating resources from the military to the civilian
60
Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They
Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 540.
61
Gates, From the Shadows, 539.
62
John B. Dunlop, The Rise of Russia and the Fall of the Soviet Empire, new postscript, 1995
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 4, 5.
63
However, Dunlop gives him full credit for lacking the bloodthirstiness that would have been
necessary to reimpose communist totalitarianism. Dunlop, Rise of Russia, 34.
64
Susanne Sternthal, Gorbachev’s Reforms: De-Stalinization through Demilitarization (Westport,
CT: Praeger, 1997), 2.
410 DAVID ROWLEY
sector,65 but “the bane of Gorbachev’s reform efforts was the conservative and
tenacious Central Committee, which foiled his attempts to renew it at every
turn.” In the end, Gorbachev failed because of his “… unswerving commitment
to the Party, and his inability to accept that as an institution it was inextricably
tied to all the vestiges of Stalinism…”66
Anthony D’Agostino, in Gorbachev’s Revolution, turns “the role of contin-
gency and individual frailty, of chance and irony, of the heroic and the tawdry”
into an inner flaw of totalitarianism by portraying Gorbachev as a symptom of
“the fatal weakness of Soviet communism.” Gorbachev “ … was in the most cru-
cial sense a product of that system of power struggle [of Soviet politics], with its
lack of normal constitutional limits and its passion for ideas.” 67 The Communist
Party, he adds, could never permanently resist the conquest of the party itself by
personal despotism, 68 and Gorbachev’s zig-zags of reform and reaction “… are
inexplicable unless we see them against the background of the struggle for power
that engaged him to the very end of his period in office.”69 “Like Stalin and
Khrushchev, a centrist who made timely turns to outwit those who sought to
limit him, [Gorbachev] subordinated and finally crushed the party and its collec-
tive controls.”70 Thus Dunlop, Sternthal, and D’Agostino complement the
analyses that stress the structural defects of communist dictatorship, and which
define the end of that dictatorship as collapse (and not reform) because it was
just the opposite of what its leader intended.

Up to this point the discussion has centered on studies of the nature of commu-
nist political power and the logic according to which it disappeared. Kiernan and
Roeder, however, raise an issue that presents the totalitarian model a major
problem in interpretation – the role of the national republics. Movements of na-
tional self-determination are common events in a great many different kinds of
“normal” states. The destruction of the USSR by the forces of nationalism would
not in itself imply that the regime was totalitarian, merely that it was unable to
assimilate or pacify its ethnic minorities. In order to make the dissolution of the
Soviet Union consistent with the totalitarian paradigm, either of two arguments
must be made. 1) Movements for national liberation can be considered secon-
65
Sternthal, Gorbachev’s Reforms, 2.
66
Sternthal, Gorbachev’s Reforms, 210.
67
Anthony D’Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 1998),
342.
68
D’Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution, 9, 8.
69
D’Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution, 342.
70
D’Agostino, Gorbachev’s Revolution, 9.
dary to and derivative from the prior breakdown of the central regime. 2) Such
movements can be attributed to a contradiction in Soviet nationalities policy that
is specific to communist ideology (and not the result of “normal” popular
nationalism associated with the development of a modern civil society).
The first of these alternatives is exemplified in many of the works mentioned
above. Malia, for example, asserts that the nationalities revolted against the center
only after the economy declined 71 and when the regime lost the will to coerce. 72
Kiernan attributes independence movements among the republics to a
contradiction within Gorbachev’s electoral politics.73 Rutland says that separa-
tism appeared only after “a political vacuum opened up at the centre of the for-
mer Soviet Union.”74 Roeder considers the rise of republics to be a by-product of
the political struggles at the center. 75 Holmes also considers national liberation
(by the nations of Eastern Europe as well as the republics of the former Soviet
Union) to be more a reaction to political and economic failure on the part of the
center than an authentic demand for independence.76 Castells and Kiselyova ar-
gue that nationalism was not a result of social modernization, but was caused by
“the backlash of cynicism and disbelief generated by seven decades of indoctrina-
tion in the themes of communist Utopia” and by the self-interest of the political
elites of the republics.77 Dunlop suggests that republican revolt against the center
was more anti-communist than nationalist; once Gorbachev turned conservative,
reform could only continue in republics that were independent.78 Lo says that
ethnic nationalism was “more a product than a cause of loosening regime
controls.”79
The second approach to nationalism into the totalitarian paradigm – to
assert a basic contradiction between communism and nationalism – finds
support in the works of scholars such as Richard Pipes and Walker Connor,80
who further assert that Lenin’s approach to the national question was purely
71
Malia asserts that “… despite the recurrent appearance of national cultural protest, this multina-
tional empire remained stable as long as the economy was able to support a strong central state.”
72
Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, 492–93.
73
74
Rutland, Politics of Economic Stagnation, 225.
75
76
Holmes, End of Communist Power, xi.
77
Castells and Kiselyova, Collapse of Soviet Communism, 40–41.
78
Dunlop, Rise of Russia, chaps. 1 and 2.
79
Lo, Soviet Labour Ideology, 7.
80
Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923,
rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 22. Walker Connor, The National Question
in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 5–9.
412 DAVID ROWLEY
instrumental and opportunistic81 and that his goal was to create a centralized,
totalitarian state for which the nominal multi-national federation, the USSR, was
only camouflage.82 It follows, then, that the growth of national separatism in the
Soviet Union was a fundamental contradiction of Lenin’s goals. Soviet
communist nationality policy thus contained the seeds of its own destruction.83
Pipes hinted at the possibility of future trouble when he said that “… by granting
the minorities extensive linguistic autonomy and by placing the national-
territorial principle at the base of the state’s political administration, the
Communists gave constitutional recognition to the multinational structure of the
Soviet population… This purely formal feature of the Soviet Constitution may
well prove to have been historically one of the most consequential aspects of the
formation of the Soviet Union.”84 Connor comes to much the same
conclusion. 85
Following this sort of analysis, Alexander Motyl, in Sovietology, Rationality,
Nationality: Coming to Grips with Nationalism in the USSR, established himself as
a leader in the study of Soviet nationalities under Gorbachev by predicting, in
1990, the inevitable dissolution of the USSR due to republican separatism. Ad-
hering to the totalitarian model, Motyl denies that nationalism arose as a result
of the rise of civil society (because of “modernization, social mobilization, com-
petition, and the like”86) and argues that separatism was the work of power-
seeking elites in the republican communist parties. Motyl concludes that
“endowing the USSR’s regional bureaucracies with relative control of culture is,
therefore, the fatal flaw of the Soviet system. As we shall see, it was an inevitable
flaw, and it had its origins in Marxism’s original confrontation with, and inabil-
ity to deal with, the nationality question.”87
Reneo Lukic and Allen Lynch, in Europe From the Balkans to the Urals: The
Disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, make the same sort of double
argument: both that national self-determination could only occur because the
81
Pipes observes that “once he realized the value of the national movement as a weapon for fighting
the established order, he stopped at nothing to employ it for his own ends.” Pipes, Formation of the
Soviet Union, 35. Connor agrees: “Holding out the vision of independence for non-Russian peoples
proved very instrumental in the Bolsheviks’ acquisition of power.” Connor, National Question, 45
(see also 33–38).
82
Pipes, Formation of the Soviet Union, 296. Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, 142, 439.
83
Connor, National Question, 483.
84
Pipes, Formation of the Soviet Union, 296–97.
85
Connor, National Question, 497.
86
Alexander J. Motyl, Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality: Coming to Grips with Nationalism in the
USSR (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990),157.
87
Motyl, Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality, 86.
central government was weakened and that the very structure of the federal gov-
ernment fostered separatism.
Analysis of the genesis, workings, and eventual disintegration of the Soviet
and Yugoslav states shows that the ethno-federal constitutional structure of both
multinational communist party-states, politically beginning during the period of
uncontested dictatorial rule by Stalin and Tito respectively, became a powerful
catalyst for the collapse of both states once the premises of unitary party-state
rule were called into question.88
Even though Walter A. Kemp, in Communism and Nationalism: A Basic
Contradiction? asserts that the rise of nationalism occurred because of moderniza-
tion (urbanization, growth of literacy, etc.), he emphasizes that this was
inadvertent – communism only “unwittingly created many of the prerequisites
for the development of national consciousness.”89 Moreover, “… communism’s
failure to cope with nations and nationalism contributed to the strains under
which it withered away.” 90 Thus Kemp, too, considers national separatism to be
a symptom and not a cause of communism’s demise.
Ronald G. Suny, though a prominent revisionist, makes an analysis that
seems to have much in common with the assumptions of the totalitarian para-
digm. In The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the
Soviet Union, Suny argues both that the collapse occurred only after the central
government began to disintegrate91 and that the rise of nationalism under com-
munism was not due to the awakening of historical nations or the rise of moder-
nity but to a contradiction in Soviet nationalities policies. 92 Like Donald Filtzer,
however, Suny distinguishes himself from the totalitarian paradigm by implying
88
Reneo Lukic and Allen Lynch, Europe From the Balkans to the Urals: The Disintegration of
Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 381.
89
Walter A. Kemp, Nationalism and Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: A Basic
Contradiction? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 84.
90
Kemp, Nationalism and Communism in Eastern Europe, 206.
91
Suny asserts that “… the open challenge to the empire came only after the top party leaders de-
cided to reform radically the political system, only when Communists themselves began a process
that delegitimized the Soviet system and allowed a political voice to the nationalist alternative.”
Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet
Union (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 126.
92
Suny describes the USSR as “… a state that had set out to overcome nationalism and the differ-
ences between nations had in fact created a set of institutions and initiated processes that fostered
the development of conscious, secular, politically mobilizable nationalities.” Suny, Revenge of the
Past, 126. This process has also been discussed (with different emphases) by Yurii Slezkine, “The
USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic
Review 53: 2 (Summer 1994), 414–52; and Francine Hirsch, “Toward an Empire of Nations:
Border-Making and the Formation of Soviet National Identities,” Russian Review 59: 2 (April
2000), 201–26.
414 DAVID ROWLEY
that the system failed not because it was Marxist but precisely because it aban-
doned “… socialism’s original program of egalitarianism, empowerment of labor,
radical democracy, and internationalism.”93 Moreover, Suny argues against the
totalitarian paradigm’s idea that the failure of communism was inevitable when
he concludes that the end of the USSR “… was contingent on a host of other
factors that could have gone differently…”94 Nevertheless, Suny represents the
Soviet Union not as a system that has reformed itself into a modern form (as the
revisionists had predicted) but as something that “collapsed.”

No matter what term one applies to it, however, the disappearance of the Soviet
Union dealt the revisionist/modernizing model a devastating blow. By the late
1980s, leading proponents of the modernizing paradigm were anticipating the
imminent realization of a democratic, pluralistic, market-oriented USSR.95 After
1991, however, there was no avoiding the conclusion that Gorbachev had failed
to achieve his goals. Virtually no one now asserts that the Communist Party or
Gorbachev realized their aspirations. Nevertheless, to the extent that the revi-
sionist model is simply “anti-totalitarian” it has continued to survive, largely by
making a logical point: the mere fact that the Soviet Union ceased to exist does
not prove that it was doomed by its essential nature to disappear.
Two kinds of objections can be mounted against the idea that the Soviet
Union was brought down by its own inner logic. First, it is possible to assert the
role of contingency and free will in history and to hold that even a “collapse”
need not have been inevitable. Second, it is possible, as I indicated at the outset,
to distinguish between Gorbachev’s program of democratization and the struggle
93
Suny, Revenge of the Past, 157.
94
Suny, Revenge of the Past, 159.
95
Moshe Lewin, shortly before the end of the Soviet era, argued that Gorbachev was reforming the
Soviet system in a fundamental way. “The political essence of the Gorbachev phenomenon – the
repoliticizing of the political system – continues unabated. The one-party system has been shat-
tered, the new-style presidency has been approved, and Gorbachev’s intention to eliminate
altogether the office of party general secretary might have left the country – whether it is still the
USSR or just Russia – with one democratically elected official, the president, in charge. Although
the title of General Secretary was not abolished, the party and its ruling structure are in fact losing
their previous grip on the state, and the result is actually the same.” Moshe Lewin, Gorbachev
Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation, expanded edition (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1991), 159–60. For other optimistic views, see also Seweryn Bialer, “Gorbachev’s Program of
Change: Sources, Significance, Prospects,” Political Science Quarterly 103: 3 (Fall 1988), 403–60; S.
Frederick Starr, “The Soviet Union: A Civil Society,” Foreign Policy 70 (Spring 1988), 26–41; and
Gail Lapidus, “State and Society: Toward the Emergence of Civil Society in the Soviet Union,” in
Politics, Society, and Nationality Inside Gorbachev’s Russia, ed. Seweryn Bialer (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1989).
for national sovereignty by leaders of the Soviet republics. One could substantiate
the modernizing paradigm by arguing that the successful reform of a totalitarian
system into a pluralist democracy had already taken place before national
separatism dissolved the union.
In one of the earliest post-mortems on the disintegration of the USSR,
Alexander Dallin takes the first alternative by implicitly criticizing the logic that
Malia and Laqueur employ. Dallin rejects “all manner of determinism and inevi-
tability, mysterious ‘essences’ and broad a priori philosophical schemes,”96
suggesting that there were “… a number of serious flaws and fragilities in the
Soviet system. But there are no grounds for arguing that they doomed it.”97
Dallin ultimately settles on “very distinct acts of will” – in other words,
Gorbachev and Yeltsin.98 Dallin thus considers the end of Soviet communism as
a highly contingent set of occurrences that, because of its indeterminacy, neither
proves nor disproves either paradigm.
Robert V. Daniels develops the second alternative by suggesting that the use
of the term “collapse” is misconceived. “‘Collapse’ is a facile popular image of
what was actually a complex, step-by-step, and still incomplete process of change
in the society or societies of the Soviet Union.” 99 He suggests that by the time
the USSR disbanded itself, the Soviet system had already made the transition
from communism. He argues that democratization and decentralization had be-
come irreversible after 1989, that the Communist Party had become a “hollow
shell,” and that “serious economic breakdown was a characteristic not of com-
munism but of the system that replaced it.”100
Archie Brown, in The Gorbachev Factor, elaborates the idea that totalitarian-
ism had ended before the Soviet Union fell apart and argues that Gorbachev, a
sincere democratic reformer, intended to bring it to an end. Brown denies that
Gorbachev was a crypto-Stalinist seeking ultimate power or even a Leninist who
wanted to preserve and perfect communism. Instead, “at least from the summer
of 1988 onwards, there was a conscious aim on Gorbachev’s part to transform [the
Soviet political system].”101 Moreover, Brown argues that before the USSR disin-
tegrated, Soviet communism had already come to an end. He asserts that
96
He includes as factors the loosening of controls, spread of corruption, erosion of ideology, social
change, international environment, economic decline, but he privileges none of them. “… [N]one
of the trends we have examined was the prime motor in this process of change.” Alexander Dallin,
“Causes of the Collapse of the USSR,” Post-Soviet Affairs 8: 4 (1992), 295.
97
Dallin, “Collapse of the USSR,” 296.
98
Dallin, “Collapse of the USSR,” 297–99.
99
Robert V. Daniels, Russia’s Transformation: Snapshots of a Crumbling System (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 212.
100
Daniels, Russia’s Transformation, 212, 213.
101
Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 307.
416 DAVID ROWLEY
… from the spring of 1989 it is scarcely meaningful to describe the

Soviet Union as a communist system. It is not only that the greater part of
Marxist-Leninist dogma had been abandoned by then – and by the party
leader himself – but also that the most important defining characteristics
of a Communist system, whether structural or ideological, had ceased to
apply as a result of the policies introduced during the period of radical
reform which got seriously under way in 1987 and became more fun-
damental in 1988.102
In short, Brown implies that communism did not “collapse” – Gorbachev had
already reformed it out of existence before he lost the final struggle over reform
of the federal union.
In Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991, Jerry Hough
makes the strongest possible case for the modernizing paradigm by arguing that
the Soviet Union had given up communism before 1991 and that the dissolution
of the USSR was the result of a failure of leadership at the center, but most of all
by portraying the Communist Party as the principal agent in making the transi-
tion from communism to a market-oriented democracy. Hough argues that
Communists simply changed their minds, and he asserts that the demise of
communism “… occurred because the elite had lost faith in the centralized
command-administrative system and adopted a new faith that dismantling the
government was the secret of economic growth and efficiency.” 103 He further
points out that it was former Communists who managed the entire transition
from communism to post-communism.104
Hough’s use of the term “revolution” tends to conceal the fact that the story
he tells is really one of continuity and self-transformation of the Communist
Party. By drawing parallels with the French Revolution, however, Hough em-
phasizes his point that the forces of modernization had grown up organically in
Soviet society in the preceding decades. He calls the events of 1990–91 “a true
middle-class revolution, a revolution of the bureaucrats, of the bourgeois who
managed the means of production,”105 and he identifies the social base as “… the
large numbers of urbanized, well-educated, skilled workers and white-collar per-
sonnel who had been created by the communist regime.”106
102
Brown, Gorbachev Factor, 310.
103
Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991 (Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution Press, 1997), 449.
104
Hough, Democratization and Revolution, 2, 496.
105
Hough, Democratization and Revolution, 1.
106
By emphasizing the social aspect of the transition to post-communism,

Hough diminishes the role of Mikhail Gorbachev as the genius of reform. He is
extremely critical of Gorbachev’s policies and suggests that much of the chaos of
the transition was due to his mishandling of reform. Hough discounts the
importance of the nationalities issue by asserting that “the centrifugal forces in
the Soviet Union were less explosive than in most countries of the third world
and were counterbalanced by a recognition of the tight economic integration of
the country.”107 He concludes that the union fell apart because Gorbachev “…
refused to use enough force to ensure obedience to Soviet laws and to suppress
separatism.”108 Moreover, “his failure to oppose Yeltsin’s attack on the treasury
and to defend the central government’s power of taxation created serious doubts
within the military and bureaucracy about the desirability of supporting him
against Yeltsin.”109 Hough’s ultimate point is that, whereas the “revolutionary”
change from communism to market democracy was the natural product of the
forces of modernity, the dissolution of the USSR was a very avoidable accident
caused by the mistakes and weakness of a single individual.
Rasma Karklins, in Ethnopolitics and Transition to Democracy: The Collapse of
the USSR and Latvia, is most interested in the relation of ethnicity to democracy,
and he does not directly confront the question of whether the Soviet Union
“reformed” itself or “collapsed.” However, his explanation of the dissolution of
the Soviet Union as a gradual, popular, democratic process would seem to sup-
port the modernizing paradigm. Karklins’s main point is that “… the
empowerment of ethnic and civil communities in the former Soviet Union
evolved in a complementary way, with one reinforcing the other.” 110 As he ex-
plains, “as in Russia, elections in Latvia became true schools for democracy by
fostering civic participation and creating an institutional alternative in a formerly
closed political system. And because electoral politics is by its nature linked to
specific territories, it was to be expected that issues concerning the Latvian nation
and state would play a prominent role.”111 Although he examines the develop-
ment of ethnicity, Karklins does not appear to treat it as a flaw of the Soviet
system, but as a natural concomitant of democratic reform within the USSR.

107
108
109
110
Rasma Karklins, Ethnopolitics and Transition to Democracy: The Collapse of the USSR and Latvia
(Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1994), xviii. Karklins’s previous work,
Ethnic Relations in the USSR: The Perspective from Below (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986) also
affirms the idea that nationalism is a product of modernity and civil society.
111
Karklins, Ethnopolitics and Transition to Democracy, 111.
418 DAVID ROWLEY
Other scholars, however, have taken national separatist movements as the foun-
dation for yet a third way of conceptualizing the nature of the Soviet regime.
Since 1917 considerable attention has been paid in the West to the imperial as-
pect of Soviet power. The USSR was a multi-ethnic state that incorporated a
large part of the old tsarist empire, and tensions have been observable between
the authoritarian center and the subordinate peripheries. Soviet extension of
hegemony into Eastern Europe and assertion of influence on its Asian borders
also begged for comparison with the goals of its imperial Russian predecessor.
However, prior to its dissolution, there had been no Anglophone scholarly effort
to conceptualize the USSR as essentially an imperial regime. Terms related to
“empire” were frequently used to refer to the Soviet Union, but the debate over
whether the Soviet Union was a totalitarian or a modernizing regime monopo-
lized scholarship on the question of regime identity. Because the idea of empire is
incompatible with both, the totalitarian and the modernizing schools preferred
to think of the Soviet Union to be a state that happened to have imperial charac-
teristics rather than a state that was essentially an empire.
Whereas the totalitarian model posits a unique and unprecedented political
regime whose goal is to build a utopia, “empire” suggests a very traditional kind
of government whose ideology is merely a rationalization for the expansion of
territorial power. The notion that empires must inevitably collapse is not derived
from logic, but from observation – every state that has been termed an “empire”
has collapsed. Consequently, proponents of the totalitarian model consistently
denied, before 1991, that the Soviet Union was no more than the recreation of
the Russian empire under a new name.112
112
Frederick Barghoorn summed up the general Western view when he asserted an “insoluble con-
tradiction” between a national culture and a universalist ideology. Pointing to Stalin’s use of
nationalistic themes during World War II, Barghoorn argued that nationalism was only a tool –
strictly controlled by the regime and always subservient to Marxist ideology. Frederick C.
Barghoorn, Soviet Russian Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 233. Adam
Ulam adds that “… communism, not only in theory but as it has been practiced in Russia, appears
as a movement and ideology quite apart from traditional Russian nationalism or Panslavism. The
Communists are not and never were simply Russian nationalists and imperialists in Marxist
clothes.” Adam Ulam, The New Face of Soviet Totalitarianism (New York: Praeger, 1963), 125.
Even Richard Pipes, who wrote the classic study of how Soviet Communists rebuilt much of the
old Russian empire, The Formation of the Soviet Union, and who is famous for emphasizing the
continuities from tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union in Russia Under the Old Regime (New York:
Scribner, 1974) and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Knopf, 1993), nevertheless
emphasizes the Soviet ideological commitment to communism and not to Russian imperialism. In
Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, Pipes lists four affinities between communism and tsarism –
autocracy, virtual absence of private property, lack of collective or individual rights, and state con-
trol of information. He does not mention empire. Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 503.
The concept of empire is equally problematic for the modernizing paradigm.

Empires are considered to be historically obsolete and are expected to dissolve
under the pressures of modernity. The sort of modernization attributed to the
Soviet regime by the modernizing paradigm (urbanization, industrialization)
might have been expected to have produced a homogenous Soviet culture instead
of national separatism. The modernizing school consequently also treated the
multi-ethnic character of the USSR as an accidental rather than an essential
characteristic of its regime.
During perestroika, increasing attention was paid to the nationalities ques-
tion, but no Anglophone scholar proposed to understand the USSR through the
model of empire. Instead, scholars continued to consider it simply as a regime
(whether totalitarian or modern) with a nationalities problem.113 It has only been
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union that Anglo-American scholars have be-
gun to pay theoretical attention to the problem of Russian imperialism (focusing
on center-periphery relations),114 but work is only beginning on the analysis of
what these imperial relationships imply regarding the nature of the Soviet regime
itself. Those scholars who have begun to analyze the Soviet system in terms con-
sistent with empire do not form a self-conscious school, but they appear to be
contributing to an emerging imperial paradigm for interpreting the Soviet
Union.

113
Edward Allworth et al., eds. Soviet Nationalities Problems (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1971); Robert Conquest, ed., The Last Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford:
Hoover Institution Press, 1986); Bohdan Nahaylo and Victor Swoboda, Soviet Disunion: A History
of the Nationalities Problem in the USSR (New York: Free Press, 1989); Gregory Gleason, Federal-
ism and Nationalism: The Struggle for Republican Rights in the USSR (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1990); Lubomyr Hajda and Mark Beissinger, eds., The Nationalities Factor in Soviet Politics and
Society (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990); Philip G. Roeder, “Soviet Federalism and Ethnic
Mobilization,” World Politics 43: 2 (January 1991), 196–232; Gail W. Lapidus, Victor Zaslavsky,
and Paul Goldman, eds., From Union to Commonwealth: Nationalism and Separatism in the Soviet
Republics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
114
Two recent collections have much to say about the dynamics of the struggle between the center
and peripheries of empire without confronting the question of regime identity except by implica-
tion. Karen Dawisha and Bruce Parrott, eds., The End of Empire? The Transformation of the USSR
in Comparative Perspective (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1997); Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen,
eds., After Empire: Multi-Ethnic Societies and Nation-Building. The Soviet Union and the Russian,
Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). For a discussion of the
historical roots of Russian imperialism and its prospects for the future, see Mark R. Beissinger,
“The Persisting Ambiguity of Empire,” Post-Soviet Affairs 11: 2 (April–June 1995), 149–84, and
Ronald Grigor Suny, “Ambiguous Categories: States, Empires and Nations,” ibid., 185–96.
420 DAVID ROWLEY
After supporting the totalitarian paradigm in Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality,

Alexander Motyl has begun to abandon it in favor of an imperial model. He has
begun to assert that totalitarianism is best conceived not as a theoretical model
but as a typology; not as a regime type but as a feature that a regime might exi-
bit.115 Motyl now de-emphasizes the structural flaws of Soviet communism, and
seems to give more credit to popular movements for national self-
determination.116 Moreover, he suggests that it was the absolutist (rather than the
socialist) nature of the Soviet state that carried the seeds of its own destruction.117
The concept of “absolutism” is more consistent with an imperial definition of the
Soviet regime than a totalitarian definition, since it refers only to power structure
and not to ideology. Earlier, in Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality, Motyl had
anticipated this when he argued that “… maximally constraining states with
quasi-federal territorial structures offer nationalist contenders special
opportunities for joining the tug-of-war with the state as well as multiple
resources for transforming it into a serious contest.” 118
Johann Arnason has also pioneered the transition from the totalitarian to an
imperial conceptualization of the Soviet regime. On one hand, in The Future that
Failed, he argues that communism was not viable because of its totalitarian
logic,119 and he says that “the Soviet model collapsed under the strain of its in-
built tensions and imbalances.”120 On the other hand, he stresses the continuity
between the political culture of the Russian empire and of the Soviet Union, ar-
guing that communism was not an ideological utopia but an ideology of imperial
modernization.121 Finally, Arnason concludes with the sort of circumstantial and
contingent explanation of the collapse of the Soviet Union that is typical of ex-
planations of the falls of empires. “The escalating crisis was a result of cumulative
developments, but not the only conceivable outcome; a different mode of crisis
115
Alexander J. Motyl, “The End of Sovietology,” in The Post-Soviet Nations: Perspectives on the
Demise of the USSR, ed. Alexandr J. Motyl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
116
Alexander J. Motyl, “Totalitarian Collapse, Imperial Disintegration, and the Rise of the Soviet
West: Implications for the West,” in The Rise of Nations in the Soviet Union: American Foreign
Policy and the Disintegration of the USSR, ed. Michael Mandelbaum (New York: Council on
Foreign Relations Press, 1991).
117
Alexander J. Motyl, “From Imperial Decay to Imperial Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Empire
in Comparative Perspective,” in Nationalism and Empire: The Habsburg Empire and the Soviet
Union, ed. Richard L. Rudolph and David F. Good (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
118
Motyl, Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality, 58.
119
Johann P. Arnason, The Future that Failed: Origins and Destinies of the Soviet Model (London
and New York: Routledge, 1993), 23.
120
Arnason, The Future that Failed, 212.
121
Arnason, The Future that Failed, 18–21.
management might have led to a more long-drawn-out decline. Historical con-

tingency must be given its due…” 122
Walter Laqueur is an explicit defender of the totalitarian model,123 but, in
The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union, he, too, represents the
demise of the Soviet Union as the decline and fall of an empire. He rejects the
typical conclusions drawn by the totalitarian school and suggests that the Soviet
regime faced no crisis in the economy, foreign affairs, or public attitudes.124 In-
stead, Laqueur draws parallels to the experience of the Roman empire, and he
points out that there is no clear consensus on the cause of that decline and fall,
either.125 Referring to Gibbon’s explanation that Rome fell because “Christianity
sapped the morale of the empire”126 Laqueur suggests that “the collapse of the
system came about because of the loss of self-confidence among the rulers: the
fact that they put up surprisingly little resistance against the forces challenging
them.”127 His overall conclusion, however, stresses the circumstantial and the
contingent: “… the breakdown of the communist order and the Soviet empire at
a specific time (1991) was possible only because of certain historical
accidents.”128
Jack Matlock also contributes to an imperial conception of the Soviet Union
in Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of the
Soviet Union. Matlock does not oppose the idea that communism was totalitar-
ian, but neither does he portray it as the victim of an inner flaw. Instead he
stresses historical contingency and says that “to understand why the cold war
ended in 1989 rather than 2089 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 rather
than 2091 – and why the latter occurred with little violence in the empire’s
122
Arnason, The Future that Failed, 215.
123
Laqueur asserts the “… simple truth that there was no ‘straight and short road’ from Commu-
nist totalitarianism to a civil society…” Laqueur, The Dream that Failed, 187.
124
“While the economy was working badly, the country could probably have muddled through for
years, without an acute political crisis. The quality of life in the Soviet Union was bad and deterio-
rating, but there was no public outcry against conditions perceived as intolerable. Setbacks in the
foreign political field were bothersome but not fatal: Moscow could have cut its losses in Afghani-
stan without the empire unraveling. Eastern Europe was not in a state of revolt; there was still the
fear that the Soviet army would put down any serious challenge without much difficulty. The dis-
sidents were few and isolated – their message did not reach the masses.” Laqueur, The Dream that
Failed, 71.
125
“… Historians pointed to the high death rate, the presence of too many idle people, the infla-
tion of government officials, and overcentralization.” Laqueur, The Dream that Failed, 50.
126
Laqueur, The Dream that Failed, 50.
127
128
422 DAVID ROWLEY
heartland – we must think about the decisions actual people made.”129 In the
end, Matlock “blames” Gorbachev and Yeltsin equally for dashing “the only real
hope that the Soviet Union could transform itself peacefully (or relatively peace-
fully) into a democratic state…” 130 Consequently, the process Matlock describes
is how the USSR fell apart – not how the communist system deteriorated.
John L. H. Keep, in Last of the Empires: A History of the Soviet Union,
1945–1991, asserts that over much of the period of its rule the Soviet Union is
properly characterized as totalitarian. 131 Nevertheless, as his title suggests, he em-
phasizes the imperial nature of the Soviet regime, and he explains the collapse as
the product of national separatism. “As the central institutions crumbled, the
national minorities vociferously claimed their rights, and in 1991 centrifugal
pressures brought about the empire’s collapse.” 132 Gorbachev began a “revolution
from above,” but the real “revolution from below” was made by the leaders of the
non-Russian minorities who sought “… to mobilize mass support for national
objectives – first for cultural autonomy and then for full sovereignty and
independence.”133 Moreover, consistent with the imperial paradigm, Keep does
not consider the collapse to be foreordained or the inevitable working out of
longer term processes since he says that “… clearly an element of chance was
involved as well.”134
Raymond Pearson, in The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (in which he in-
cludes not only the republics of the USSR but the nations of Eastern Europe as
well), suggests that “… the rise and fall of the Soviet Empire may only be under-
stood fully as essentially the latest – but possibly the last – episode in a confron-
tation between nationalism and imperialism which has dominated eastern
Europe for the last one hundred and fifty years.”135 The reasons he provides for
the collapse of the empire ignore questions of totalitarianism and focus on prob-
lems typical of all empires: accelerating economic decline and financial
bankruptcy, overextension, unrelieved stress of the Cold War, and, “the single
greatest challenge,” nationalism. 136 Pearson concludes: “a final explanation for
129
Jack F. Matlock, Jr., Autopsy on an Empire: The American Ambassador’s Account of the Collapse of
the Soviet Union (New York: Random House, 1995), 649.
130
Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire, 655.
131
John L. H. Keep, Last of the Empires: A History of the Soviet Union, 1945–1991 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 4.
132
Keep, Last of the Empires, 3.
133
134
135
Raymond Pearson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998),
1.
136
Pearson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, 167–69.
failure lies in the more generalised observation that the Soviet Empire was an
anachronism in the later twentieth century.”137
Ariel Cohen confirms this argument in Russian Imperialism: Development and
Crisis, asserting that the Bolsheviks built “a Russian-dominated empire which
was in many respects a continuation of its tsarist predecessor” and that
“[m]essianic communism, especially during its first twenty years, effectively con-
cealed the imperial nature of the old Romanov state’s communist reincarna-
tion.” 138 Cohen does not explicitly reject the totalitarian model, but he does
suggest that had scholars in Soviet studies focused on the imperial nature of the
USSR, they would have been better prepared to understand and predict its col-
lapse.139 However, Cohen does not develop a theory of Soviet imperialism as
much as he attempts to demonstrate that the USSR displays the characteristics
included in every significant definition of imperialism developed over the last
half century.140 Nor does he settle on one explanation of why the Soviet empire
collapsed when it did. Cohen’s fundamental attitude appears to be that empires
are essentially unstable and must eventually collapse.
Ben Fowkes, in his Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and
Triumph of Nationalism, contributes to the development of an imperial paradigm
by rejecting the totalitarian model, by denying that “the collapse of the Soviet
Union was in any sense inevitable,”141 and by focusing on the importance of
nationalism in the Soviet republics. Fowkes emphasizes the continuities from the
Russian empire to the Soviet Union,142 and he argues that there was a continual
struggle between the periphery and the center throughout Soviet history. Unlike
Suny and other scholars who argue that national identities were formed by Soviet
policies, Fowkes understands national identities to have already formed before
the end of the tsarist period, and unlike Pipes and Connor who see a contradic-
tion between communism and nationalism, Fowkes sees only the conflict
between center and periphery that is typical of empires. Stalin held the USSR
together only by coercion, and the rise of national self-determination was inevi-
table once Soviet leaders lost the will to use force to preserve the union. In the
end, Gorbachev’s “… reforms, moderate though they were, allowed the accu-
137
Pearson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, 170–71.
138
Ariel Cohen, Russian Imperialism: Development and Crisis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996), 151,
153.
139
Cohen, Russian Imperialism, 164.
140
Cohen shows how the Soviet imperial collapse could be explained by the theories of Lenin,
Geoffrey Parker, John A. Gallagher, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Michael W. Doyle, Paul Kennedy,
and others. Cohen, Russian Imperialism, chap. 5.
141
Ben Fowkes, The Disintegration of the Soviet Union: A Study in the Rise and Triumph of Nation-
alism. (London: Macmillan, 1997), vii.
142
Fowkes, Disintegration of the Soviet Union, 1.
424 DAVID ROWLEY
mulated grievances and resentments to break through; national elites or segments

of them either articulated national demands or were swept aside by more radical
forces.”143
Valerie Bunce, in Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of
Socialism and the State, also contributes to the conception of the Soviet Union as
an empire – even though she does not explicitly refer to it in imperial terms. Her
analysis of the Soviet system discounts ideology144 and examines the logic of the
Soviet federal system. Bunce argues that the “collapse of socialism, the bloc, and
the state” was “nationalist to the core,”145 and she attributes that nationalism to
the structure of Soviet socialist institutions: “… the very design of these systems
functioned over time to divide and weaken the powerful, homogenize and
strengthen the weak, and undercut economic performance. As a result, the rate of
economic growth declined; upper levels of the party had reduced economic
control over the lower levels…” In a federal system like the USSR, these lower
levels were the national republics, and “… these communities had developed
over time the desire and the capacity to challenge the legitimacy of the larger
ideological and spatial community within which they were embedded…”146 In
Bunce’s interpretation, national separatism is not the product of modernity or of
a contradiction between Marxism and nationalism, it is the result of the struc-
tural relationship between center and periphery – an essentially imperial concept.
Wisla Suraska also provides a structural explanation of the demise of the
Soviet Union. But in How the Soviet Union Disappeared: An Essay on the Causes
of Dissolution, she goes even further than Bunce in explicitly rejecting both the
totalitarian and modernizing paradigms. Arguing that those paradigms are only
two sides of the same ideological coin,147 she offers a Weberian critique of the
Soviet state that defines it as a patrimonial, arbitrary despotism. Arguing that
despotism is structurally incapable of developing a professional bureaucracy that
obeys the principles of legal-rationality, Suraska concludes that “… the state’s
weakness, rather than its omnipotence, stalled communist projects of moderniza-
tion and, most notably, Gorbachev’s perestroika. Gorbachev’s failure only sealed
a more general failure of communist regimes – their inability to build a modern
state.”148
143
Fowkes, Disintegration of the Soviet Union, ix.
144
“If socialism was in fact fatally flawed,” she asks, “then why did it manage to live for so long?”
Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3.
145
Bunce, Subversive Institutions, 132.
146
Bunce, Subversive Institutions, 131, 132.
147
Wisla Suraska, How the Soviet Union Disappeared: An Essay on the Causes of Dissolution
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 7.
148
Suraska, How the Soviet Union Disappeared, 133–34.
Suraska argues that the Soviet regime was destroyed by the revolt of the
republics, which, in turn, was a product of the inner logic of despotism. In des-
potic empires, she says, the center uses two means of control – a powerful means
of coercion (the army and the secret police in the Soviet case) – and delegated
rulers of the peripheral territories. Gorbachev’s reforms subverted both these axes
of Soviet power. First, he so alienated the army that it became an unreliable sup-
port of the regime,149 then, “the republican and regional leaders, treated by
Gorbachev to glasnost and popular elections, turned to nationalism and localism
as the tactics of personal survival.”150 Suraska concludes: “in short the Soviet
Union fragmented and collapsed not because it contained many nationalities and
was economically declining, although these things helped, but because it was
despotic.”151

Bunce and Suraska appear to be on the cutting edge of an emerging imperial
paradigm for understanding Soviet history. Both scholars provide a structural
analysis of the Soviet regime that promises to transcend the totalitarian-
modernizing paradigms and to accommodate the notion of empire as an integral
(and not accidental) aspect of that regime. The idea of empire (in an analytic and
not just descriptive sense) would find no contradiction between the idea that the
Soviet regime was a centralized autocracy and the possibility that it pursued
modernizing policies. Conceived as an imperial reformer, Gorbachev’s policies
could be analyzed without the necessity of determining whether he was “really” a
sincere Communist or “really” a democrat. The choice of the proper term to use
to describe the end of empire (“collapse,” “transition,” “revolution,” or “reform”)
would carry less ideological weight.
In the end, however, we must conclude that the way in which the USSR
ceased to exist cannot prove the validity of any of the three paradigms. Choosing
the name for the end of the Soviet regime is as interpretive an enterprise as the
definition of the nature of the regime itself. Moreover, as I have argued, the two
kinds of definitions are logically dependent upon one another. For example, the
notion that a regime is fundamentally unviable carries with it the prediction of
eventual collapse, while the judgement that a regime has collapsed would imply
that searching for inner flaws in the system would be a fruitful line of inquiry. It
would seem that the scholarship reviewed here performs what Thomas Kuhn has
149
Suraska, How the Soviet Union Disappeared, 56, 82.
150
Suraska, How the Soviet Union Disappeared, 141.
151
Suraska, How the Soviet Union Disappeared, 133.
426 DAVID ROWLEY
termed “puzzle solving” in “normal science.”152 That is, the authors have taken
the disappearance of the Soviet Union to be a puzzle which needs to be explained
in terms of one or another paradigm. The meaning of the end of the Soviet
Union thus derives not from the historical data, but from the paradigm through
which the data are interpreted.
Nevertheless, despite the ultimate incommensurability of the three para-
digms, there is much in the emerging imperial paradigm that promises to smooth
the edges of (if not actually resolve) the totalitarian-revisionist debate. Like the
totalitarian position, the imperial viewpoint holds that the Soviet Union con-
tained the seeds of its own destruction. But, like the revisionist position, the
imperial paradigm is consistent with the notion that the Soviet Union was on a
modern trajectory. The cliché that “the nation-state is the agent of modernity”
suggests that imperial decay might be considered a process of modernity. Nor,
moreover, does the imperial paradigm really require that the end of empire be
considered a “collapse.” The transition from the Western Roman empire to its
successor states was very gradual indeed.
Moreover, defining the Soviet Union as despotic will allow both former re-
visionists and former totalitarianists to appreciate the full enormity of the Soviet
era without being sidetracked by debates over its implications for socialism. One
strand of the totalitarian school (frequently quoted in the body and the notes of
this article) uses the Soviet experience as evidence that socialism (if not the entire
Enlightenment tradition) is contrary to human nature. Many of the revisionists,
though they are rarely explicit on this point, contradict the totalitarian paradigm,
I believe, because of their sympathy for the ideals of equality, democracy, and
socialism. Surely, however, the discussion of what ideas are “contrary to human
nature” is properly left to theologians and philosophers. The behavior of emper-
ors like Genghis Khan, Qin Shi Huangdi, or Stalin and the bureaucrats who
served them can be adequately explained, I would argue, by generalizations about
human nature more appropriate to the study of history: people can be cruel and
greedy, and power can corrupt them. Under such unexceptionable assumptions
as these, the imperial paradigm should have no difficulty providing a solution to
the puzzle of the Soviet era.
Dept. of Social Sciences

University of Wisconsin, Platteville
1 University Plaza
Platteville, WI 53818 USA
[email protected]
152
Thomas S. Kuhn, “Normal Science as Puzzle-Solving,” chap. 4 of Structure of Scientific Revolu-
tions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962).

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or administrative personnel; the post-Soviet republics are largely governed by

totalitarian model conceive it as being historically unique, they have tended to

delegitimizing the system and, ultimately, depriving it of the will to

cal,32 by which he means that the Communist Party’s monopolistic hold on

In a related analysis, Brendan Kiernan argues that democratizing reforms

because of political opposition from conservative elements. It was more a case of

… from the spring of 1989 it is scarcely meaningful to describe the

By emphasizing the social aspect of the transition to post-communism,

The concept of empire is equally problematic for the modernizing paradigm.

After supporting the totalitarian paradigm in Sovietology, Rationality, Nationality,

management might have led to a more long-drawn-out decline. Historical con-

mulated grievances and resentments to break through; national elites or segments

Dept. of Social Sciences

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